Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [11]
Sometimes of course there would be complaints that certain letters had not arrived, but such losses could be easily explained: it was due, of course, with apologies, to the lamentable state of the mail service. The missing letters were placed on a list in Grandfather’s office. Letters have a habit of getting lost, it’s just one of the hazards of sending mail. International mail is particularly problematic. At first nobody noticed that the complaints concerning missing letters all came from the district of the city where only Father delivered the mail. Until one particular letter failed to arrive.
IT DIDN’T REALLY matter that Mirgarita Gavala’s letter from her son in Valencia, Spain (with a light-blue stamp—labelled España—of King Juan Carlos II at a value of eight pesetas), didn’t arrive—she didn’t suppose that the boy would be so considerate as to write to his ailing mother anyway. It didn’t really matter that the response to a sheaf of poems the poet Angel Berg had sent off to a publishing house in London, England (with a ten-and-a-half pence stamp of the Abbey and Palace of Holyroodhouse, and with the outline of the head of Queen Elizabeth II in the top right-hand corner), never turned up because the letter was a rejection anyway. But it was a shame that the cog sent in a little brown cardboard box all the way from Zurich, Switzerland (with two stamps, both labelled Helvetica: the first, the most colourful, for two francs, celebrating 800 Jahre of the Stadt Luzern; the second for seven francs, saying Championnat du monde de Dressage Lausanne), which would have been able to fix the ancestral and beautiful antique clock of Marian Stashak in time for his father Maurice’s eightieth birthday, never appeared. In any case there was little trauma caused by all these failed intentions that had embarked so optimistically (or not) from all those distant buildings, those distant hands and lands. Since their arrival may not have been expected, their absence often caused no tears, and people continued their quiet or noisy days unaware of the information that had been stolen from them for the sake of various colourful or monochrome rectangles of paper. But then someone in one of the smaller of the governmental offices missed a letter that he was certain should have arrived and reported the absence with a swiftness that betrayed how new he was to his position.
Ambras Cetts, for such was the young man’s name, will go far, and the more we want him to fail (for his eagerness has deeply offended) the higher he will rise.5
The letter Ambras Cetts registered as missing did not even contain any particularly important information. To be precise it boasted the official results of a recreational pistol match held at a shooting gallery in Vienna, Austria, between various civil servants from various civic authorities who were assembled in that city for seminars on the rise of vermin internationally, specifically on that menace Rattus rattus. (The stamp was for four schillings and was pink and labelled Republik Österreich and was of someone called Almsee.) Our country on that occasion was represented by a certain A. J. Cetts who would not have been interested in this missing piece of trivia had it not been for the fact that he had won the competition and was eager to present the proof to his superior at the earliest possible opportunity. When the score sheet failed to arrive, Cetts called up the shooting gallery and was informed that the sheet had already been posted to him some week and a half ago. It had certainly been lost. Another score sheet was sent (this time with a six-schilling stamp of Lindauer Hütte Rätikon, also labelled Republik Österreich), but when that failed to arrive, after another week and a half, Ambras Cetts decided to take matters into his own hands. He marched